Book publishing is a means by which knowledge in a discipline can be disseminated to the academic community and accessed by people in the industry.
In the area of communication studies, the intellectual history shows that early books of its kind helped shape the discipline to a great extent. This paper searches catalogues of National Chengchi University libraries to classify all Chinese books in the area of communication studies published in Taiwan over the half-century period.
A total of 1648 items (books) were found. Previous research showed that Chengchi ’s libraries can support up to 80 percent of journalism research need. Based on this figure a total of about 2000 Chinese books in communication studies were estimated been published in Taiwan in the last 50 years. Nearly half of the collection was published in the last decade of the 20th century and over half of it was books relating to practical aspects of mass communication industry. No single item on religious communication and health communication was found.
The author urges the communication researchers in Taiwan to labor and sweat on transforming degree theses and administrative research reports into books and get them published in calling for attention from people in the industry and people from other neighboring disciplines. Knowledge can then be shared and academic legitimacy justified.